In Which A Portmanteau Is Coined
When we got to Steff’s leather goods store, I thought we’d have to try some place else… there wasn’t really a sign or banner with the store’s name anywhere, and the windows were completely blacked out. Steff pointed to the “Sorry, we’re open.” sign on the door, though.
“Um… why don’t we have Two wait outside?” Steff said, before we went in.
Two and I both tightened our grip on each other’s hand.
“I’m not leaving her,” I said.
“Hey, there’s a candy store,” Amaranth said, pointing at a store a little ways up the other side of the street. “You can pick out something sweet, Twoey, and wait for us there.”
“I don’t have any more money for today,” Two said.
“Well, you’ve been good, too,” Steff said. “You pick something out and we’ll buy it for you. Promise.”
“Okay,” Two said, reluctantly disengaging her hand from mine. She started to head away, though she kept herself turned nearly backwards, looking at us as she went.
“That’s a really shitty thing to do,” I said to Steff. “You know, the thing she’s most afraid of is being abandoned? Why do we have to ditch her like that?”
“Trust me, it’s for your benefit more than hers,” Steff said. “You’re the protective parent… you tell me when we’re done whether you’d have wanted Two to come in with us.”
That gave me some misgivings, as did the security guard stopping us inside a curtained antechamber and asking to see our ID before we went in.
“What kind of leather goods store cards you when you come in?” I asked.
“Well, I’m afraid we’ve sorely misled you, Mack, darling,” Steff said, grinning wickedly as she pulled aside the curtain with a flourish. “You see, this store doesn’t sell leather goods at all… no, in fact, it sells… leather bads.”
Amaranth gave me a little push into the store proper and I instantly knew Steff had been right in thinking I wouldn’t want to bring Two to this store. It didn’t sell leather armor of the conventional sort, though there were plenty of masks and hoods on the walls, and all manner of wrist and neck gear, many with spiky accents… some with locks.
“Oh, look, honey!” Amaranth said, grabbing my hand with an intensity that beat out Two and dragging me to a wall-length stand covered with what looked to me like cat o’nine tails… though most of these particular kitties were equipped with considerably more appendages than that name would have indicated. “Floggers! Oh, I’ve always wanted one of these!”
She started picking them up, giving them experimental flicks. I was not so oblivious as to have not begun to form an inkling as to what exactly we were here for, and was more than dismayed to see that she went for the biggest and heaviest models, the ones with multiple knots along the lengths of the cords, and the otherwise extra-nasty-looking ones.
Okay, maybe in general terms, being whipped with a leather flog… or flogged with a leather whip, or whatever the terms were… was probably more in line with what I actually deserved than a bare-handed spanking from a nymph… but I was a wuss, and not used to physical punishment. If anybody was keeping score, then maybe the fact that I sought out punishment at all would count for something. I could hope.
Regardless of the question of what I deserved, the fact remained that I was not ready to let myself be whipped.
“Ooh, what do you think of this one?” Amaranth asked, all but shoving one in my face. “It’s so big and thick…”
It certainly was, and not just in the strands.
“Why… why does the handle look like a guy’s thing?” I asked.
“Oh, I didn’t even notice… it’s also a dildo. How clever!” Amaranth said. “We should so get this one… that way, when you feel up to penetration, we’ll already have the… oh, what’s this one?” she said, picking up another flogger that had far thinner strands and a similar, though shorter and less, ah, detailed handle. “Ooh, it’s a butt plug, honey!” she gushed. “You could wear it and pretend to have a little pony tail! Oh, and I could ride you around the…”
I felt faint, and had run out of places to clench. Steff grabbed me by the shoulders and gently steered me around so I wasn’t facing the wall display, leaving her hands on me for support as she gently addressed Amaranth.
“Amy, hon… I think you’re losing sight of why we’re here,” Steff said. “You know what Mack likes. You know what she needs. She’s not going to go for a flogger or a whip at this point, and you know penetration is gonna be on her blacklist. We can show her the paddles and slappers… and maybe the riding crops… but if you shove every toy in the place under her nose, she’s just going to freak out.”
“Oh, we could get a crop and the horsetail one!” Amaranth said.
“Amy!” Steff said, sharply. “Focus, girl!”
“I’m sorry,” Amaranth said, a little flustered. “It’s just, back on the farm… I mean… well, I always found horses fascinating. In fact… one time, before I’d learned about centaurs, I asked Mother Khaele if her prohibition on laying with unintelligent creatures included horses who knew how to do arithmetic.” She frowned at the memory. “She said it still did, though… and after I had spent weeks teaching Bocephalus how to count! But, she is the Great Mother, so it’s like, what’re you going to do, right?”
“Hey, I just discovered a new adjective,” Steff said. “‘Hilaristurbing’.” She turned to me. “I think Amaranth has exited the dungeon, hon…”
“Oh, stop it!” Amaranth said. She reluctantly tore herself away from the wall of floggers. “I just let my imagination run away… the fact is I’d much rather be flogged than do the flogging myself. I think I’m just not used to focusing so much of my desire on a single partner, is the problem.”
“It’s okay, hon,” Steff said. “We’ve got floggers. Viktor doesn’t much like to use them, but he loves to order me to whip my friends. Next time you come over, we’ll cut your plump little ass to ribbons, I promise.”
“Is there somewhere I could sit down?” I asked. I was starting to wish I’d gone to the candy store with Two.
A clerk… though I’m not sure that term applied… approached us. He was wearing a chest-baring leather vest, and had a chain connecting a ring in his ear to one in his nose to one in each nipple, to one in his navel to… well, the chain kept going, though it shortly disappeared from sight.
“Can I help you ladies?” he asked.
“Oh, I certainly hope so!” Steff said, putting her arm around me. “You see this adorably spellshocked little kitten?”
“‘Nymph’s toy’,” he said, reading off my forehead. I’d once again managed to forget the words were there. He gave me a very cheerily predatory, Puddy-like smile. “Nice.”
“Yes, well, she is an absolute slut for spankings,” Steff said, conversationally. My face went scarlet and I tried to pull away from her, but Steff didn’t let go and instead, we ended up sort of embracing, with my face buried against her shoulder. “I mean, she really can’t get enough… we take it in turns to try to satisfy her perverse lust for punishment, but we’ve only got four hands between us and she is wearing us out.”
“Understandable,” the man said. Even with my eyes closed and my face pressed into Steff, I couldn’t get away from his eyes… I felt them staring at my ass, and knew he was imagining me, bent over… my legs spread, my cheeks probably about the color my whole body was at that moment. Why was Steff saying these things in front of him? Or even at all?
“Now, you can see she’s overcome with desire to find herself inside a store like this for the first time, and I’m afraid if we let her anywhere near the paddles on display, she’s going to insist on testing each and every one until either they break, or she does,” Steff said.
The man chuckled at this. I didn’t see what was so funny. I was having a hard time breathing now. It was like each and every word that Steff said was piercing through me… not the way an insult, or an accusation from a friend, sometimes seems to… but like something big and blunt being thrust with horrible twisting force into my body by tiny degrees.
I didn’t hear every individual word of the rest of their exchange, during which the man’s laughter became greasier and more insinuating, and Steff’s voice softer and more intimate. Most of her words just sort of drew themselves across my insides… but certain particular ones pumped themselves into me almost violently.
“Eager.”
“Desperate.”
“Hungry.”
“Dirty.”
“Slut.”
“Slut.”
“SLUT.”
It didn’t help that it was her voice, her magical elven voice that carried right into my ear canal as if it had been hand-delivered and sealed with a kiss.
“I know just the thing,” the man said, finally, and I heard his heavy steps moving away.
“Look at you,” Steff whispered in my ear, for real this time… I could feel her breath. “You’d have a screaming orgasm if an ant sneezed on your pussy right now.”
She giggled.
It tickled.
“Here we go,” I heard the leather salesman say a few moments later. “Just the thing… we call this baby the Strap of Smiting. Sixteen and a half inches long, three and a half inches wide, with thirty-five individual metal studs driven through it… you can give her the flat side, or the studded side. You will not leave a more lasting impression, unless you’re willing to pay for enchantment.”
“Ooh,” Amaranth and Steff said in unison. I quivered, unwilling and unable to release my grip on Steff, to turn around and look.
“Here, hon… give her a little test whack?” Steff said, gently pulling herself away. Keeping her hands on my arms, she bent me over towards her.
I’d never yet been spanked wearing any more than panties, and I wasn’t sure what the loose material of the skirt would do to diminish the impact of the “Strap”… but Amaranth, in full view of Steff and the leather store guy, flipped the skirt up onto my back, baring me for the world to see.
I heard her giggle, and then there was a pause.
I half expected to hear an exaggerated “woosh” sound preceding the blow, but it was actually more of a… well, I’m not sure that I could compare the sound of a leather paddle swishing through the air to strike my ass for the first time to anything. It made a loud enough crack when it hit, but most of that was cut off by my scream.
I screamed, first of all, because it hurt.
I screamed second of all, because the normal–if it could be called normal–sensation of growing, of swelling, of becoming that I experienced when Amaranth spanked me seemed to have happened all at once, to have been teed up like a ball at one end of my body and shot clear through me with the force of the paddle’s impact to fly out my mouth as a single primal yell.
Third of all, because the impact, the pain, and the aforementioned sensation shocked the hell out of me.
Fourth… fourth because… because I just enjoyed it that much.
It felt good.
I was a freak for liking the feeling, but I did.
I’d needed punishment that morning and been denied it… maybe that had something to do with it.
Or maybe not.
Maybe I was just that big a freak.
Steff went to her knees to keep me from hitting the floor as I went limp, and she ended up sort of sitting herself down on the floor as she gently lowered me down. My skirt was still hiked way up. My ass was still hanging up. I was very, very wet in places that didn’t bear thinking about, as if the paddle had smashed down a dam somewhere within me and it had burst out the next nearest orifice.
“Wow,” the man said, giving an admiring whistle. If it was at the sight of my naked lower half, it was not only misplaced compared to Amaranth’s lovely, ready-for-viewing body… it was a huge delayed reaction. “You really weren’t kidding about her… I’ve seen people get off from being spanked, but not often, and not like that.”
“It’s alllll in the foreplay,” Steff said, stroking my hair in a soothing sort of fashion as my legs and arms continued to shake helplessly. I was doing my best to follow the conversation. I knew what “getting off” meant, in reference to sex. I guessed that within the culture of people who bought things like paddles and floggers, it had a different meaning… probably having to do with the feeling of pressure and release that I got.
“You know, there’s a club I work at sometimes,” the guy said. “They do amateur night… if you guys could do that on stage… maybe include a little more build-up… I can guarantee you’d get a lot of tips.”
“Thanks,” Amaranth said, her voice full of the particular shade of sweetness which I recognized as meaning she felt flattered but was about to decline something. “I don’t think my Mack is quite ready for prime time.”
I let out a shaky breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and gratitude washed over me like… like… like I was too drained to come up with a simile.
A balm, maybe?
Do balms wash?
Well, forgetting for the moment whatever the gratitude had washed over me like… it seemed as though Amaranth’s temporary “floggermania” had subsided, and she was back in control. Maybe she’d felt a kind of release, too.
“Shall I wrap this up for you, then?” the man asked.
“Honey?” Amaranth asked me. “Do you like your surprise?”
Still laying on the floor… and still horribly exposed, but not ready to do anything about it… I nodded.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. The words seemed to give me a sliver of strength, and a bit of clarity. My quaking limbs came back under my control. “Um… is there a bathroom?” I asked, trying to sit up and get to my feet without touching my thighs to each other, or to the fabric of my skirt… Steff’s skirt, actually. “I need to clean my… self up.”
Steff looked at Amaranth.
“We could have her walk around the rest of the day like that,” Steff suggested.
“Honey, how do you feel?” Amaranth asked me, looking at me with so much affection that I had to look away.
“Dirty,” I mumbled.
“Is there a bathroom?” Amaranth immediately asked the man.
He pointed me to it, and I cleaned myself up with paper towels, soap, and a lot of hot water. It was… awkward, trying to clean myself with the sink, and I ended up getting my legs and the front of the skirt pretty wet, but it was only water. I didn’t really care. I wasn’t really able to rinse the soap off that well, though, so I ended up itching pretty badly at the candy store, from which Two took home a big bag of taffy, and the comic shop we found, where Steff teased me mercilessly over the Sci-Force 5 graphic novel I picked out.
It was only on the coach ride back to the campus, while Steff and Amaranth yammered away and Two and I sat quietly… this time, Amaranth and Steff shared a bench while Two and I held each other’s hands… that I realized I hadn’t even seen the implement whose ongoing presence in my relationship I’d agreed to.
Mmmmmmm. Being spanked is incredible. There is very little to those of us wired that way, that feels better. I think the only thing to top orgasms from spanking for me, was the one time it happened from my ass getting bitten, over and over, until that lovely ”balm” (hehe) washed over me.
Gotta say, this is still, by and large, one of my very favorite chapters EVER.
<3
The spank-ee in me loves you, just a bit, for it, AE. 😉
shouldn’t the horse’s name have been spelled “Bocephallus”?
fox force five?
I’ll admit that some things about females I’m TOTALLY clueless about so,…How can she NOT know that those “burst of feelings” coming over her are orgasms?
@BlackWizard: In all fairness apparently I *still* can’t recognise a regular orgasm, and I’ve never been even the tiniest bit as repressed as Mack 😛 Given that she doesn’t really know what to expect, and besides is dead set on convincing herself she’s not even *aroused*, is it really all that surprising that she’s not made the connection?
I’m loving the story… and the sub-ness too, I always enjoy reading some good D/s. Admittedly this one is a little harder than some for me to actually relate to, but as aforementioned I was never that repressed. I’m also absurdly easy to tell off when I care about someone, so anything framed as punishment is a no-no. Disappointing my Dom is devastating enough by itself. Spankings are fun, spankings as punishment absolutely destroy me.